The Top 100 Tracks of 2011

"Someone Like You" straddled an interesting line in 2011. It's one of the biggest selling songs from the year's most commercially successful record, yet something about it feels intensely private, too. It's not a song to share with other people perhaps, but instead a song that taps into a potent wellspring of feelings that reside deep inside everybody. Its ubiquity this year also ensured that wherever you were-- on a bus, shopping for groceries, in a taxi-- this song was waiting right around the corner. It brought back memories, like a familiar whiff of perfume, the taste of certain meal, or the sound of a name, and as a break-up song, it felt definitive. --Hari Ashurst

If you can measure a posse cut's merit by its number of quotables, Craig Mack's "Flava in Ya Ear Remix" was basically the boom-bap Bartlett's. "The Last Huzzah! (Remix)" is that robotic George Jetson futuristic shit come to life. Hip-hop for the "meta" era, inter-textual and absurd as an episode of Community. The video gently parodies the Puffy-led cut, with "Bad Boy" chants substituted for those of eXquire hollering "Breast Milk, you made my day." Despot weighs Lucky Charms on a scale and flings cereal aimlessly. A back-up dancer in a cop uniform lazily writhes like she got lost on the way to a Robert Palmer video shoot. Kool A.D. is "translating Don Killuminati into Spanish" and is "Immortal Technique" #obnoxious. Heems is "the worst rapper on the track, third coolest." Danny Brown jaws at competitors, his rhyme style highly evolved beyond the bob and weave jabs of '94. His jokes are practically hyperlinked. El-P essentially invented snarling skeptic rap, so he's in perfect stride, snapping about jangled numerologies and political references to the black smoke of riot-scarred London. While eXquire closes like Busta, grabbing a chunk of belly and bragging that he still "takes his shirt off like Nelly." This is how you do things when you want to be around next year. --Jeff Weiss

Polly Jean Harvey is playing Cassandra here, a mad prophetess whose forced jollity keeps leaping up into hysteria. She's bearing witness to the atrocities of war, singing in a shellshocked tone, thinking in circles that keep looping back to a few images of horror ("soldiers fell like lumps of meat"). For a while, she can't break away from a single pealing riff, even when the song's logic demands it. And when she does, she's joined by a chorus of strapping-sounding men, repeating their chants in lockstep. (Great line: "I've seen a corporal whose nerves were shot," evidently from lower-ranking soldiers being more corporeally shot.) Harvey and the guys spend the final minute of the song repeating "what if I take my problem to the United Nations"; that's a variation on a line from Eddie Cochran's much-covered rockabilly rant about youthful political impotence, "Summertime Blues". It's a way of saying: I can't do anything. Rock can't do anything. The United Nations can't do anything. And teenage boys are going to keep being made to slaughter each other. --Douglas Wolk

This late in the year, after a mostly forgotten second mixtape and Drake's album and an apparent co-sign for the dubious rap career of one heir to the Tommy Hilfiger fortune, it can be easy to forget just how thrillingly out of nowhere a song like "House of Balloons" felt during the Weeknd's cryptic initial campaign. Not because Abel Tesfaye was among the first to cross-pollinate hazy indie sensibilities with R&B, but because of how all-consuming (to the point of suffocation) House of Balloons' voice and style and sense of mood could be. Its title track offered inroads via its wholesale Siouxsie and the Banshee's swipe-- the original "Happy House" guitar line slowed down to just a slightly more torturous crawl-- but even committed fans of R&B heard something unique here: a persuasive voice, a perfectly unlikeable persona, a distinctive hand with production. The track is Tesfaye at his best, emoting in an androgynous falsetto one minute, muttering unbelievable curses the next. It's messy, conflicted, and full of promise. --Eric Grandy

M83 have been opening their shows with this one, and it's possible that there will never be a suitable replacement for the rest of the project's existence. The first hit of whispers and oscillating synths on "Intro" are announcement enough for any momentous event, Anthony Gonzalez's impassioned howls are wind-tunnel strong, and the vocal turn by Zola Jesus' Nika Roza Danilova stirs up some real meteorological mischief, showing how well she does Big in a year where Small seemed to be her own band's M.O. As with many songs on Hurry Up, We're Dreaming, most of "Intro"'s lyrics are unintelligible-- with M83, it's all about feeling, anyway-- but one particular phrase stands out: "Carry on." Will do. --Larry Fitzmaurice

The 1980s have been fertile territory for so many young indie bands in recent years, but few have scoured darker corners than Destroyer, whose ninth record lays claim to critically devalued soft-pop from the early years of that decade. From the peculiar fade-in and drum clicks of opener "Chinatown", it's clear Dan Bejar's intent isn't simply nostalgic: the song doesn't merely revisit the period (3 a.m. in 1981) or the place (any empty midtown Manhattan street), but transforms hoary conventions into a palette for early-2000s experimentation. "Chinatown" bustles with smears of distorted trumpet and pleading saxophone, jostling against clockwork synths and a rigid drumbeat. Bejar presides over it all with an especially conspiratorial vocal, turning the refrain ("I can't walk away, you can't walk away") into a special contract between artist and audience. On first listen, it can be a disorienting experience, but the immediately immersive "Chinatown" simply asks you to erase any preconceptions you might have about Destroyer-- or about the early 80s, or about saxophones-- and give this precisely evoked world a chance to surprise and seduce you. --Stephen Deusner

It'd be a misnomer to call Gil Scott-Heron's exceptional 2010 release, I'm New Here, a "comeback"-- the word implies a certain celebratory vigor, whereas I'm New Here's weighty industrialized blues yielded vividly grim dispatches from a hard life that wasn't getting any easier. So Jamie xx's remix project We're New Here represented something more than just a ploy to repackage the work of a hip-hop godfather for a new generation of hipsters; it was an opportunity to recontextualize the long-suffering Scott-Heron's words in more forgiving conditions, a mission that took on added resonance when he passed away three months after the project's release.

In this light, the deep-house redux of "I'll Take Care of U" functions both as the album's emotional climax and a farewell address from Scott-Heron, its silken piano line and incessant throb undercut by a melancholic guitar refrain that provides the album's most pertinent sonic connection to Smith's day job. In its original form, Scott-Heron's version of Brook Benton's "I'll Take Care of You" was a bittersweet pledge of commitment from a man whose troubled life often left him without the means or wherewithal to provide. But thanks to Smith's efforts-- and, in particular, his reuse of this track on one of the biggest hip-hop albums of the year-- we can hope Scott-Heron's loved ones will indeed be taken care of. --Stuart Berman

"Green Aisles" slipped out just ahead of the release of Days, serving as an early signpost of the new maturity in Real Estate's work. There's an autumnal feel to much of their material, but nowhere more so than on this track. It's all crushed brown leaves crinkling underfoot and collars being pulled up in the face of brisk winds. That it surfaced toward the end of September was a masterstroke of marketing. But it's unlikely that the unassuming members of Real Estate care much for that-- this is the archetypal group just out there doing their thing, with little care for the whims of the industry. "Green Aisles" is their most nostalgic song to date, perfectly nailing the feeling of looking back to youthful excesses without regret. Everything delicately falls into place around singer Martin Courtney's small-town reminisces, including one of the most tasteful guitar non-solos heard all year. That's one of Real Estate's greatest assets-- their sense of creating space by knowing exactly when not to play, helping songs like this to feel like a refreshing gulp of air. --Nick Neyland

It came to my attention in 2011 that a disturbingly large number of people don't even know who fucking Larry Csonka is. Unfortunately for them, the Action Bronson song of the same name didn't provide any clues. Csonka, the bruising Miami Dolphins fullback with the Burt Reynolds mustache and that weird cyclops facemask, doesn't even appear until the last line of this song, and for no real reason other than it's fun as hell to say his name. While the footballer in question had a reputation as tough guy in the 1970s, the Queens-bred rapper evoking him comes over like a lovable goofball. Action Bronson is far more convincing when talking about food (cracked pepper, handmade crust, prosciutto, and olives from Tunisia all make an appearance here) and weed than he is about about kicking ass or picking up women. But he knows how to laugh at himself (he takes a break mid-song because he's "straight out of surgery") and the staccato horn-punch beat gives him room to spread his undeniably derivative (hard not to hear Ghostface, especially when he says "style") but exceedingly likable flow. --Mark Richardson

I recently noticed that the running time of the mp3 of Todd Terje's "Snooze 4 Love" in my iTunes is 8:08. Surely the reference wasn't intentional, but the happy accident nonetheless highlights what makes the Norwegian space-disco wonder's touch so special. His work's filled with surprises that take a while to sink in. Ace single "Snooze 4 Love" is a steam-operated study in the power of addition and subtraction-- some pronounced bass here, a hypnotic synth riff there, now here comes a time-stands-still break. The key to it all is his patience. Terje is always willing to take the the scenic route, and "Snooze 4 Love" is one of his most deliciously rewarding journeys. --Larry Fitzmaurice